A walk along Ching Cheung Highway

(Written Sunday 12 April, Evening)

I took this walk on a beautifully warm, sunny Sunday afternoon. The walk away up the hill from the Heritage Lodge Hotel soon gives way to a pedestrian walkway along a slip road leading to the Ching Cheung Highway, a stilted 4 lane highway about 150 feet above the sloping hill, passing under the Tsing Sha highway, another 100 feet or so above!

The scale of this feat of engineering is mind boggling - one thing that is apparent to me after just a few days here is the focus and drive of the Honk Kong Chinese people. The roads and buildings that have gone up since I was last here are on an exponential scale. In 1994 when I was last here none of these superhighways were in existence, and the underground system was much smaller - I remember you had to catch a bus to Kennedy Town, where I was staying then. Now this is connected by the MTR.

Under the Tsing Sha Highway

 The views from up on this walkway are stunning (if more than a little vertigo inducing!) I look down on a playground park, beautifully landscaped and built. It’s right under the span of the motorway above, which completely dwarfs it. It seems so incongruous to me, but doesn’t seem to bother the children playing there or the adults sitting on benches or walking their dogs (no-one kept pets when I was here 20 years ago). It’s hard to convey the scale of this landscape of hillside, super highway and vegetation, but it makes me feel very small and insignificant. I’m wondering how people here cope with this dwarfing and rapidly changing environment. I’m very aware of the polarity between these impersonal, vast, built spaces, and the personal, on the ground, human element.

Further along the path the road snakes past the backs of high rises; some in the midst of construction, cocooned in their bamboo scaffold and net skin like giant chrysalises, waiting to be born into this brave new world. Alongside them are the backs of several tenements and factories, all stained paint and adorned with a pattern of pipes and air-conditioning units. They look like giant upended and burnt out circuit boards, all the more strange for being so close to their glass and steel neighbours. The fascination of this place is that opposites are rammed like tectonic plates right up against each other. The survival of both, for different reasons, is a big question. Is it possible for expansion to continue at this pace unchecked, and in the wake of such change, what toll will it have on its inhabitants?